If you take a look around most offices, you’ll likely notice that there are two kinds of workers. There are those whose work spaces look like something out of a magazine called “The Perfectly Organized Office” and then there are those whose desks look like a nuclear waste area that should be declared hazardous to human life.

I have been fortunate that for most of my career I have had my own office—one that I could decorate and set up to my own taste and, more importantly, one that I could keep as neat and tidy as I desired. A few years ago, I became more attuned to different approaches to workplace tidiness when I changed positions and moved into a large office that I shared with another professor.

It quickly became obvious to me that he and I had very different approaches to handling our work areas. If you’ve ever seen the movie or television show The Odd Couple, you’ll know the differences between neat freak Felix and, how shall I put it, the more “relaxed” style of Oscar. While I don’t mean to imply my co-worker and I were quite that extreme, we may have had more than a passing resemblance to Oscar and Felix.

My co-worker belonged to that unique club of people that proudly display signs like “A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind” in their work areas, while I come from the school of “A place for everything and everything in its place.” I must admit that after a time I started to envy his relaxed approach. He rarely seemed stressed if he had to walk out of the office at the end of the day and leave a jumbled pile of work on his desk. On the other hand, I can lie awake in bed for hours thinking about the mess I didn’t have time to clean up before I left the office.

Even worse, despite the apparent disorganization on his desk, my co-worker could often reach beneath a pile and pull out exactly the thing he was looking for. This made it even harder to be too smug about my tidy tendencies, because sometimes I put things away so well, I can’t find them. And despite the pristine condition of my desktop, it’s often at the expense of my desk drawers, which sometimes look like the Tasmanian devil has taken a turn or two in them. I don’t buy into the idea that a clean desk is a sign of a sick mind, but you could probably convince me that a clean desk is at least a sign of a messy desk drawer.

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Tags: office organization